This blog is intended to share for others or teachers and who wants to be a teacher, which contains several articles and educational materials were obtained from various sources

Friday, December 21, 2012

Dyslexic child Struggles With Reading

No one can ever prepare a parent for two things: the immeasurable love
that comes with having a child; and the sorrow and confusion that comes
when your child appears to learn in a different way from other children.
I am an educator and neuroscientist, who studies how the brain learns
to read and what happens when a young brain can't learn to read easily,
as in the childhood learning challenge, developmental dyslexia.

Yet, despite this knowledge, I was unprepared to realise that my
first son, Ben, was dyslexic. He was five years old when I put all the
pieces together, and I wept as soundlessly and deeply as every other
parent. I wept not because of his dyslexia, which I understood very
well, but because I knew the long, difficult road Ben faced in an
educational system ill-prepared then to meet his needs. That was the
first thing I did 16 years and eight schools ago.

The
second thing was to concentrate my work on ways to help our society
understand two huge things: first, the complex, unnatural miracle that
takes place every time a brain learns to read; and second, the fact that
many children with dyslexia have a different brain organisation – one
that poises them for greatness in many areas; but makes them inefficient
at learning written language.

Helping every child meet his or her
potential, not only children with challenges, is the underlying goal of
this letter, my new book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of
the Reading Brain, and the work of my entire field.

It all begins with understanding that reading does not come naturally to human beings. We humans invented literacy,
which means it doesn't come for free with our genes like speech and
vision. Every brain has to learn it afresh. Learning to read for the
brain is a lot like an amateur ringmaster first learning how to organise
a three-ring circus. He wants to begin individually and then
synchronise all the performances. It only happens after all the separate
acts are learned and practised long and well. In childhood, there are
three, critical "ring acts" that go into the development of reading:
learning about the world of letters; learning about the individual
sounds inside of words (which linguists call phonemes); and learning a
very great deal about words.

Many things help each of these three areas develop, and parents
and loved ones can foster them all. The most important contribution
appears deceptively simple: speaking and reading to your child from
infancy onwards. Children who spend the first five years of their lives
exposed to a great deal of oral language with others (and not from a
television or other media) and listening to a great many books being
read to them enter kindergarten with advantages that prepare them to
read. In one well-known study, children in more privileged language- and
book-rich environments heard 32m more spoken words than children raised
in disadvantaged environments. It was not economic poverty, but
"linguistic poverty" that put these children at profound risk for
failure before they entered the kindergarten door.

In dyslexia,
the reasons for reading difficulties aren't that simple, or as easy to
prevent. Somewhere between five and seven years of age, most young
brains are readied to become their own ringmasters and bring all their
knowledge about letters, sounds and words together to read. For children
learning the alphabet, they must learn that a particular sound
corresponds to a particular letter, which in English isn't always as
straightforward as in other languages. Thus, programmes that emphasise
the principles of phoneme awareness and decoding (that is, systematic
phonics programmes) represent an important foundation for all children
first learning to read. There are, of course, other linguistic areas
that must also be emphasised, including vocabulary knowledge,
familiarity with how words work grammatically, and also knowledge about
the smallest units of meaning in English, called morphemes. Ideally, our
children need all of these emphases when learning to read.

In
dyslexia, many children have particular difficulties distinguishing the
phonemes or sounds within words. That makes it very difficult for them
to learn the rules for which particular letters go with which sounds.
Other children with dyslexia aren't able to acquire the speed necessary
to get the different parts in the reading system together; they never
learn to read fast or fluently enough to comprehend what they read.

Brain
imaging studies are beginning to suggest that these difficulties may
emerge in part because many children with dyslexia are endowed with a
very strong right hemisphere that they use to read. In most people the
left hemisphere is largely used in reading. The right hemisphere, which
is involved in many spatial, artistic, and creative functions, is,
however, very inefficient for reading, which would explain why it takes
so long to learn to read. If this research proves correct, it also helps
explain why so many great, creative figures have a history of dyslexia:
artists like Picasso, Gaudi, and Rodin; writers like Yeats and Agatha
Christie; and entrepreneurs like Richard Branson, Charles Schwab, and
Michael Heseltine.

The problem is that no one tells children or
their parents, teachers, and classmates that some of the world's most
creative and brilliant minds had similar difficulties learning to read.
Most children with dyslexia do not easily learn to read, spell, or
write, and they believe this means they must be "dumb" (their
classmates' description), or "lazy" (what many parents think) or "not
working up to their potential" (many teachers' description). Not all
children with dyslexia have extraordinary talents, but everyone has a
unique potential that is being daily whittled away by this lack of
understanding.

Source: Maryanne Wolf is the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University. She will be speaking at The Reader Organisation's Reading for Wellbeing conference on Tuesday 17 May, at the Floral Pavilion in the Wirral.

Original Article :

Dear parent: why your dyslexic child struggles with reading

In
a letter to parents of children with reading problems, Maryanne Wolf
explains how dyslexic children's brains are organised differently.